Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method to route work requests in an enterprise, and particularly to a system and method for routing a work request to a suitable resource group of the enterprise.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. Contact center resources include the agents, the communication assets (e.g., number of voice trunks, number and bandwidth of video trunks, etc.), the computing resources (e.g., speeds, queue lengths, storage space) and so forth. A primary objective of the contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency and capability in usage of its available resources. The contact center efficiency is generally measured by metrics such as service level agreement (SLA), match rate, and work-occupancy.
Service level is one measurement of the contact center efficiency and capability. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within the specified period by the number accepted plus the number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, canceled, flowed out etc.). Service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is also an indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency and capability. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent for a queue over the same period. An agent with a primary skill level is one that typically can handle contacts of a certain nature more effectively and/or efficiently compared to an agent of lesser skill level. There are other contact center agents who may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as secondary skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically handled more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent.
Work-occupancy is another indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency and capability. Work-occupancy is usually determined for a group of agents available in the contact centers. The agents are mostly grouped based on their geographical locations, skills, offices, languages, work experience, and so on. Conventional technique for determining work-occupancy of a group of agents is by determining their instantaneous group-occupancy. The instantaneous group-occupancy is defined as the number of agents occupied divided by total number of resources in a group and is expressed as an instantaneous value for a given time frame. This technique does provide work-occupancy of a group for an instantaneous moment, however, fails to take into account occupancy of a group over a specific time period. Therefore, the conventional technique for determining group-occupancy is not sufficient for determining overall work-load on a group for a period of time.
For example, if a routing system of a contact center needs to apply a fair policy of routing work on its agents, then the conventional technique of determining the instantaneous group-occupancy is not reliable, as this technique determines work load on a group of agents only for a particular time instant. Thereby, assume if a group of agents have been busy all day working and get some relaxation time in the evening, then the conventional technique of determining group-occupancy will determine that the group has less work load and must be provided with more work. However, the group has been busy all day and must not be provided more work at the end of the day considering the fair policy of routing work.
There is thus a need for a system and method to provide an automated mechanism for determining work-occupancy of a group over a time period. Further, there is a need for a system and method to provide a fair policy of routing work to a group of agents based on their work-occupancy over a time period.